by Nanette Ashby
In this episode, Nanette Ashby is joined by Dr Laia Anguix Vilches. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University. Between art history and gender studies, her research revolves around the first women in positions of power and influence in art museums across Europe. Together, we discuss the ins and outs of this project, the importance of historical contexts, political environments, and the advancement of women’s rights. Laia strongly insists on the transitional aspects of the time period she is focusing on, which is the late 19th and 20th centuries. Women’s growing access to education, career opportunities, and the consequences of the two World Wars on the labor market made these positions more accessible. We lean into the intersectional aspects of the topic, covering issues such as the marriage bar and work/life balance, lower salaries, and the significance of networking amongst women. Laia also talks us through the more practical difficulties of postdoctoral research such as working primarily with archival sources as well as budgetary and travel restrictions.This episode offers insight into the gendered aspects of art history and participates in anchoring the importance of the role played by women in cultural institutions.
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Mentioned during the episode:
Laia Anguix Vilches: https://www.ru.nl/en/people/anguix-vilches-l
Laia’s research project at Radboud University – Women managing Museums: https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-projects/women-managing-museums
Laia’s publications on this topic so far:
- Anguix-Vilches, L. (2024) “Pioneering female museum directors: a transnational comparison”. In: Hurtado, I. and Cintia Gutiérrez, eds. Cartografías de género en la expresión artística contemporánea. Dykinson, pp.14-38.
- Anguix, L. (2022). “Women directors in museums c.1908-1965: an interdisciplinary approach”. Journal of Art Historiography, 27S.
She is currently co-editing a volume on women in museum management. More info here.
Other publications by Laia, available on academic social media:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Laia-Anguix // https://radboud.academia.edu/LaiaAnguix
Books and Articles mentioned by Laia during the episode:
- Azor Lacasta, A. (enero-junio 2023) Pioneras de la museología en España. Cinco mujeres que abrieron la puerta de los museos arqueológicos. Arenal, 30:1, 211-244. https://doi.org/10.30827/arenal.v30i1.17032
- Bucarelli, P. (1944) Cronaca di sei mesi. De Luca Editori d’Arte.
- Díaz-Andreu, M. and Marie Louise Stig Sorensen, eds. (1998) Excavating Women. A History of Women in European Archaeology. Routledge.
- Ferrario, R. (2010). Regina di quadri. Vita e passioni di Palma Bucarelli. Mondadori.
- Fontanarossa, R. (2015). La Capostipite di sé. Etgraphiae.
- Ginex, G. (2018) “Sono Fernanda Wittgens”. Una vita per Brera. Skira.
- Hill, K. (2016). Women and Museums, 1850-1914. Modernity and the gendering of knowledge. Manchester University Press.
- Mignini, M. (2009). Diventare storiche dell’arte. Una storia di formazione e professionalizzazione in Italia e in Francia (1900-40). Carocci Editore.
- PODCAST SERIES: “Paladine”, Italian Ministry of Culture. https://cultura.gov.it/paladine
Further information:
Palma Bucarelli: https://www.milestonerome.com/2019/05/palma-bucarelli-daring-icon-of-italian-art/
Caterina Marcenara: https://www.arateacultura.com/le-signore-dellarte-caterina-marcenaro/
Fernanda Wittgens: https://breraplus.org/en/story/fernanda-wittgens/
Paola della Pergola: https://www.ilgiardinodeilibri.it/autori/_paola-della-pergola.php
Elisa Maillard: https://isidore.science/s?q=elisa+maillard
Jeanne Misme: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Misme
Bertha Hindshaw: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/women-and-museums-1850-1914-modernity-and-the-gendering-of-knowledge-by-dr-kate-hill/
Violet Rodgers: https://www.yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk/blog/celebrating-80-years-of-york-castle-museum-violet-rodgers-our-first-female-curator/
Anne Buck: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Buck
Barbara Winstanley: https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bostonglobe/name/barbara-winstanley-obituary?id=36927126
Marian Frost: https://brightonmuseums.org.uk/discovery/history-stories/marian-frost-rebel-victorian-librarian/
ICOM (International Council of Museums): https://icom.museum/en/
More on the “marriage bar”: https://www.pressreader.com/uk/who-do-you-think-you-are-magazine/20190312/281578061954274
Episode Transcript:
Nanette Ashby
Welcome to the gender and diversity podcast Culturally Curious, where arts and culture have never been more titillating with me, your host, Nanette Ashby.
In this episode, I’m joined by Dr Laia Anguix Vilches. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Radboud University. Between art history and gender studies, her research revolves around the first women in positions of power and influence in art museums across Europe. Together, we discuss the ins and outs of this project, the importance of historical contexts, political environments, and the advancement of women’s rights. Laia strongly insists on the transitional aspects of the time period she is focusing on, which is the late 19th and 20th centuries. Women’s growing access to education, career opportunities, and the consequences of the two World Wars on the labor market made these positions more accessible. We lean into the intersectional aspects of the topic, covering issues such as the marriage bar and work/life balance, lower salaries, and the significance of networking amongst women. Laia also talks us through the more practical difficulties of postdoctoral research such as working primarily with archival sources as well as budgetary and travel restrictions.This episode offers insight into the gendered aspects of art history and participates in anchoring the importance of the role played by women in cultural institutions.
A transcript of our conversation with all information and links mentioned during the interview is available in the show notes over on our website at raffia dash magazine dot com. We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode of Culturally Curious over on our Instagram page, which is @raffia underscore magazine. Also, don’t forget to leave us a rating and review over on iTunes and Spotify. It is much appreciated!
Thank you so much, Laia, for joining us today. Could you introduce yourself to the listeners?
Laia Anguix Vilches
Thank you very much for inviting me to this podcast. I’m very excited. My name is Laia Anguix Vilches and I am a postdoctoral researcher here at Radboud, at the Radboud Institute for Cultural History and the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures. My research sits on the intersection between art history, visual culture, museum studies, and gender.
Nanette Ashby
That’s very interesting to me. So we’re gonna specifically talk about the research project you’re doing right now here at Radboud. Could you tell us more about it? What’s the topic? And what are the general parameters that you chose to focus on?
Laia Anguix Vilches
Of course. My research here at Radboud is a two-year project that focuses on pioneering women managing museums across Europe. So I’m looking at the earliest examples of women that had, well, different work titles according to the countries, because that changes quite a bit. Some of them were considered to be “chief curators”, some of them “directors”, some of them were called “managers”. Sometimes, I found the nomination of “bosses”. So these different work titles, but the idea is more or less the same: it’s someone in a decision making role in a museum or cultural heritage institution. The time frame that I’m working with is also quite variable, according to countries, but it more or less extends between the late 19th century, like the 1890s and the 1950s or 1960s, depending on the countries.
I analyze different aspects of these women. I look at the historical context, I look at the impact of historical milestones, such as the two World Wars, the arrival of Communism, fascist dictatorships in several countries, and also milestones in women’s rights. I look at their access to education and training, their access to the job market, methods of appointment, legal limitations, and challenges that they faced, cultural prejudices, their personal background also. I also look at their networking skills and their achievements as curators and museum managers. It’s a part that is, let’s say, more positive than the rest.
Nanette Ashby
And you mentioned that you’re looking at multiple countries. Which countries are you focusing on?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So because of the time constraints that I have, because this is a short project, and also, because of the language access, which is something I will explain, but most of my data comes from archival research. I visit the museums where these women used to work, I collect all the documents that I can find. And, because of these two considerations, I’m limiting right now to mostly 4 countries. That is the UK, Spain, Italy, and France. That’s the languages I can read fluently. Also, focusing on mostly a kind of museum that is art galleries, and also ethnographical and archaeological museums, just to limit, because, otherwise, like, all kinds of museums would be too much.
Nanette Ashby
Definitely. So what kind of sources do you use?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So there’s different methods through which I’m approaching the research. As I mentioned, the main method would be archival sources. So in museums, where I normally find these curatorial reports, that’s like the reports that women were writing about their work and the exhibitions they were curating, or also all the management aspects of the museum. I look at their letter books, like how they were corresponding with other people in the sector. I also look at committee minutes, like when they were meeting other people inside the museums. There’s normally, like, a record of these conversations that they were having. Plenty of bureaucratical documents related to the funding of the museum, to their salaries. So all of these are archival sources.
Then I also look at plenty of primary literature. That’s literature that was published during the period, either by them, by the women who were researching and authoring publications, or also by men that were also working in the sector. And I compare both of them. And then I look at the policy reports and select laws that were developed by the different countries at that time.
I also look at museological texts. Museology was starting as a discipline in the early 20th century. So I look at what was being discussed on a wider level in the sector. So these are the main sources.
Initially, I also had the plan to interview people who were descendants from these women. But there was something that I had not expected to come across in the beginning…is that many of these women didn’t have any descendants because they remained single, and that’s something…
Nanette Ashby
I was wondering about that as well. I think we’ll come to that later, but that was one of my questions as well. Because I assumed, to get into those positions and also keep those positions, they also couldn’t take part in other societal roles or pressures and expectations. And as you said, to do that, you speak multiple languages to research in all the different countries to be able to read the different documents.
Laia Anguix Vilches
That’s it, yeah. It implies a lot of traveling. And the first part is locating these archives that are not always kept. Also finding the women themselves, like trying to individuate their names, and selecting the case studies that are the most relevant for my research, either because they stayed for a longer time or because of the kind of museums they were managing. And then, yeah, I organized the trip there, I tried to get as much information as I can in a few days. It’s been by taking pictures of all the documents they have and just bringing them back to the university to read them.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah, because that would be impossible to actually read everything in the archive itself and trying to…
Laia Anguix Vilches
I would have to stay there much longer, which would be, like, unsustainable financially for me.
Nanette Ashby
As we’re already talking, there are challenges when doing this kind of research. You need to speak the languages. You need to travel to locations. And it’s also common in this field, when it’s about women’s history, that the sources aren’t kept as well as other documents, I assume. Is that correct? Or…
Laia Anguix Vilches
So what I’ve found so far is not as much because of the gender of the person who was in charge, but there’s a whole series of circumstances that imply that some documents have been kept and some of them have been lost. Like, for example, the time frame I’m looking at, it involves two World Wars, which is, like, quite something. And, I’ve seen some of the countries, like, Spain had a civil war and a dictatorship, and many documents were, like, politically sensitive and they’ve been lost over time or because someone, maybe at some point, didn’t want that to be kept. So these kinds of circumstances imply a certain strike of luck. You never know what you’re going to find.
And also, in many cases, that’s something that happens transnationally. I should have mentioned it. I’m researching in different countries and then compare them with each other. Women tended to work for smaller institutions that maybe didn’t have the resources to have a big archive, to keep everything, or that maybe closed during some periods. So all these aspects affect the conservation of documents.
Nanette Ashby
Okay. Makes sense.
Laia Anguix Vilches
It implies plenty of challenges to do this kind of research. The first one is just…as the archival materials are scattered all across Europe in sometimes very peripheral locations… Like, just as an anecdote, but I have a woman curator I’m very interested in, in Inverness, in the Highlands, in Scotland, and it’s, like, really far away. So, yeah, I know that the documents are there, but my access is still, like, I would need to to get there first. That implies also, like, budget limitations. Then, because of the timeframe of the project, I’ve also mentioned that maybe I haven’t managed to do as many interviews as I would like to. So, yeah, this is a bit of a challenge in multiple ways, but it’s an exciting one, I would say.
Nanette Ashby
Definitely. Definitely. And especially the fact that one can compare the different countries. I find it very fascinating that in a small space like Europe, there is quite a rich but hidden history. We’ll jump into that in a moment. So my next question was…a lot was happening in the time frame that you’re looking at. So my question: what shifted during the late 19th century and early 20th century to allow women to enter managerial positions within museums? I assume that’s also tied to the World Wars and the fact that there were more jobs open for women in general in the workforce. Was that similar in the museum sector?
Laia Anguix Vilches
It’s a great question. It’s a very good one, but it’s also very complex too, because it implies, yeah, like the different histories of the different countries, and how they intersect with each other. But, in general, the first third of the 20th century brought very big changes within social structures, and it was a crucial time for the emancipation and professionalization of women, not only in the museum profession, but, as you mentioned, in plenty of different professional sectors. There is one aspect that is crucial for these women: it was the growing access to education for them, to higher education, to universities. Then there was the industrialization of society. So there was a widening in the access to paid labor, that women had an opportunity to get a salary out of the house. There was also an improvement of means of transport, so they were more free to move to other locations. There were better public services. As you mentioned, there were plenty of social and political changes that were provoked by both Wars. Women took jobs that men left while they were fighting, while they were away. So they began to work in factories, in banks, in offices, in public services. And people got used to see women in…facing the public and doing activities that started to be seen as something normal, let’s say. And that knocked down many prejudices and myths about the female sex being unable to carry out professional activities. So that helped it. Also, after the war, there were many men who didn’t return because they had died. So some women who had taken temporary jobs during the war could keep them afterwards. That happened especially after World War II.
Also, there was a general impoverishment of the middle class during the interwar years. There were women who had just to keep on working to feed their families. So there was this changing attitude towards them.
Nanette Ashby
Education became accessible. I remember that also the field of museology was quite new, and I was a little bit surprised that women were able to join so early in the beginning of this new field. But when you say there were more options in education, can you give some examples of what that education could look like or where it was?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So it was very different according to the different countries that I’m studying. For example, in Italy and Spain, women accessed museum management roles via a university degree, mostly in Art History. Well, Art History in Italy, which was more specific. And for Spain, it was kind of an umbrella degree that was called Philosophy and Letters, and that implied, like, all kinds of Humanities disciplines. And then in France, it was more of a professional training. They attended the Ecole Du Louvre, Ecole of the Louvre, and that was a very specific training only for museum workers. Then, in the UK, their access was mostly an on-site access: women started working in museums without any specific training, mostly doing auxiliary roles, like assistance of male curators. And then they grew while they were already working in the museum. There was access to specific training by the Museums Association. That’s the professional organization that gives voice and advocates for the rights of museum workers. So they were accessing training while they were already at work. So there’s these differences. However, I must say that none of them automatically warranted the access to a paid role in a museum. That was another fight. After the education, there was the matter of being appointed for these kinds of roles.
Nanette Ashby
And that’s what you focus on, specifically, the roles that were paid and appointed?
Laia Anguix Vilches
I had to make this distinction because, in many cases, women were working since earlier than what I’m looking at. Since the 19th century, we see plenty of women already in museums, collaborating as volunteers, acting as patrons, making donations, interacting with committees, in some cases also as assistants. But, some of these roles weren’t paid, some of them had a short time span because…I guess we will talk about this later, but women who were married were not allowed, in many countries, to keep on paid employment. So, yeah, these are earlier examples that I’m not looking at. I’m only…just because I need to cut down somehow…I’m just looking at women who could actually be paid and have a job title that specified that they were in a managing role.
Nanette Ashby
As you already mentioned, you limited your view on art galleries and specific museums and not the whole breadth of possible museums. Did you also notice that there were specific subgroups of those museums that were more accessible to women?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So I’ve come across examples of women working in many different types of museums. So I would say it was maybe not a particular type, but there is a tendency towards a particular size, which is, like, smaller museums that received less funding and, very often, they were in peripheral locations, so far from the capitals of the countries. All these circumstances, let’s say, constrained in museums to appoint women…I don’t like this way of expressing it…but there was a very important salary gap between men and women in the profession. So women would have lower salaries, and that made them, like, convenient for museums who could not afford to appoint a man. So that’s why maybe there is this pattern that women were working in small museums that were far away. Still, like, if we look at the major museums across Europe nowadays, like the big flagship museums in every country, we still find a minority of women in these kinds of positions. Like, the more prestigious a museum gets, the more interesting it gets for male competitors. So there is this kind of bias according to the size of the museum, let’s say.
One of the reasons why I’m focusing on art galleries…besides because I’m an art historian myself, so I have this kind of of preference…but also, in many cases, women in science museums didn’t start their careers as museum managers, but got to that position later in their life because of previous scientific achievements. So they were first, like, university professors or scientists, and they were awarded, like, the directorship of a museum, a science museum, as a kind of award later in their lives to emphasize their importance in science, in their science career. I mean, in many cases, those were also honorary roles: it means that they weren’t paid for that. It was more of a societal recognition.
Nanette Ashby
I can imagine that getting into universities was already a struggle and not very common, especially for the first generation. Could you tell us more about the situation the women were in at university? How small of a minority were they? And do we know more about their experience at the universities and their general education?
Laia Anguix Vilches
Regarding their access to universities, it changes across countries. But there is, like…the late 19th century, beginning of 20th century…we start to see the first examples of women that were admitted. That means it’s not always equivalent to getting a degree. In the beginning, they were just admitted as listeners. And then they were, as you have said, they were a minority. I have found in the specific cases of the women I’m studying, both in Italy and in Spain, they tended to cluster together in just a few universities. In both cases, Spain and Italy, there was a male scholar who acted as a kind of mentor for these women and who also continued to exert an influence on them later in their lives. They continue to send him letters to ask for information, to help them with concerns that they had in their professional lives. So in the case of Italy, his name was Adolfo Venturi and is considered as the founder of the Art History discipline in Italy. And in Spain, his name was Gomez Moreno. He had very similar circumstances to those of Venturi in Italy, but Moreno’s interests, I think, were a bit wider. As a curiosity, he had three daughters, and two of them would also become museum curators later in their lives. And the third one was a visual artist. So there was this very strong influence, even on his own daughters.
In France, there is a difference because, as I’ve mentioned, this was more of a professional training. Linked together, all these women, is the fact that they were all highly educated with class distinctions. Both in Spain and Italy, women tended to come from low or middle class, but they were families that were very culturally engaged, so they wanted to make this sacrifice to give their daughters an education. In some cases, the original goal was optimizing their marriage perspectives, to give them more opportunities to find a better husband, let’s say, not as much as giving them a professional exit. It started to become increasingly common to offer girls this opportunity as the economic circumstances were very volatile in early 20th century Europe, where families wanted to make sure that the daughters could have a paid job. For example, three of the five women curators that can be found in Spain, before the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s…three of them were only studying this degree of Humanities, but they were also teachers. And, they were doing this Education Diploma, which was something very common, a very common professional exit for women at that time. So their families wanted to make sure that they had a means of sustenance in case they wouldn’t marry or in case things would turn for the worst.
So this is a contrast with the Ecole du Louvre in France, which didn’t really offer many post-graduation professional opportunities for women. It was something that women studied because they liked it, but not because there was a job afterwards. So already in the 1920s, we find reports of discouraging women to attend the Ecole du Louvre on the grounds that they would not be able to find a job. This did not discourage women, they continued to attend and it was a very feminized degree, but, yeah, they were expected to work on voluntary roles. And this had an impact on the social profile of the students. They have been described…I quote from our research…and they were described as mainly “Parisians from wealthy bourgeois or aristocratic classes”. And the Ecole du Louvre was described as a “breeding ground for young girls of good family ready to marry”. This perception of female museum work as a pastime for single ladies is maybe one of the reasons why the arrival of women to the museum profession in France is later than other countries.
With the British sector, we tend to find again, like, middle class women working there. I mentioned before, they specifically, like, they didn’t require a specific diploma, so they were already working, and it means that they were working women who really needed a professional exit. So, yeah, there’s this, like, being…their profile was not only because of their education, but also because of some social background.
Nanette Ashby
Makes sense. This might be a bit of an obvious question, but I assume the gender discrimination continued into their day to day work in the museum.
Laia Anguix Vilches
So once they got in the roles, there were different levels of agency, also according to the social structures of the countries, legal background, the limitations that they had, they change across countries. Something that is quite common is the fact that they were cultural prejudices against them. Like, that they would be less able to do their jobs. In some of the countries, there’s quite a high level of supervision from someone on top of them, like a governmental officer, or someone that was, like, requiring reports or ask how they were doing. So this is quite common.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah. Since we’ve already been talking about the different countries and mentioning differences, were there any differences that surprised you and that really stood out that you maybe didn’t expect?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So I guess something that surprised me the most is the lack of a balance between the professional and the personal lives. I mentioned that many of them did not marry, did not have any children… And in some cases, I’ve found examples of women who were literally living inside the museums they were managing. They built houses or apartments for themselves that even contained part of the museum’s collections inside. Let’s say, like, their personal life was, like, an extension of the museum they were managing. There’s, for example, the case of Palma Bucarelli at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. Caterina Marcenaro, who was at Palazzo Rosso in Genova, or Consuelo Sanz Pastor at the Cerralbo Museum in Madrid. They were all living and even built the apartments, specifically for themselves inside the museum.
Nanette Ashby
So we can see that it was also passion for the women, not, as assumed by the men, that it’s a pastime to wait to get married, but actually, the women in the positions were very passionate about their work.
Laia Anguix Vilches
There were, of course, many examples of women who left the profession because they married. Because, at that time, well, in several of the countries I’m studying, there was something called the marriage bar, which was a legal practice that forced women out of their profession, once they married. So it operated in two ways. Like, women who were already married could not be appointed, and women who were single and then married had to quit their jobs. In these cases, all the women I’ve mentioned were still single at the time, and that’s the reason why they could stay in the profession, yeah.
Nanette Ashby
You had to choose between staying in the position and doing potentially what you love and are passionate about or starting a family.
Laia Anguix Vilches
Yeah. In some cases, it was like that. Like, for example, in the Netherlands, there was a marriage bar, in the UK… It did not exist in Italy or in Spain, for instance, but there was a very heavy weight of the tradition and costume and what was expected from women that also acted as a deterrent for many of them because it was, like, traditionally considered that women should be taking care of their families and not being busy with an external occupation. So that also acted against the careers of many women, even if it was not a legal requirement for them. There are a few cases also of women who left the profession for some years to take care of their children and came back later in their lives when their kids were older. So that is something I have come across too.
Nanette Ashby
Well, that’s very interesting too. So I assume there weren’t many positions for women. And one could think, “Oh, there must have been a lot of competition between women already at university and then also finding a job.” Was that the case? Or was there more a sense of unity and support, especially locally, since you already mentioned there were groups of women around a mentor? Do we know much about that? Can we say anything about that?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So I haven’t come across specific cases of competition amongst women, like one against another. Because, as I mentioned, they tended to get jobs at the smaller museums and with lower salaries. So these museums were maybe less interesting. So there wasn’t this real fight. The competition was perhaps mostly against men for getting better jobs and also to reach management positions, and some freedom to really make decisions on their own. There are also many cases of women who had studied together, and they were connected and networking since very early stages in their careers. I think the most beautiful case study that I found is the friendship between Fernanda Wittgens, who was the director of the Galleria di Brera in Milan, and Paola della Pergola, who directed the Galleria Borghese in Rome. And they were both friends, and there’s plenty of letters that they exchanged with each other talking, about their personal problems, but also about the problems that they faced as women, and the challenges that related to their gender and the management of these two very big museums.
But there are also cases of women who really did not like the competence or the interference of other women. And, I guess the case that’s most famous in this regard is, again, Palma Bucarelli. And she wrote her own memoirs, and I’m quoting her…she wrote: “women hate me, they envy me, very few women like me, and almost all men like me.”
Nanette Ashby
Can one actually read those memoirs? Were they…how were they published? Are these still accessible?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So Palma Bucarellis’ memoirs are published. It’s a very tiny book that only occupies six months of her life. It’s called Chronicles Of Six Months, and it describes her work during World War II in evacuating the collections of… Well she created a network, she contacted the pope in Rome… And for some time, this modern art collection was hidden inside the Vatican because it was, like, the safe place. But once German invasion took place and then with all the advancements of the Allies, everything became very unsafe. So, she then managed to find a palace, I don’t know, like, in a rural area, and the collections were moved there. It’s a very, very exciting read. It reads like a war novel. And there’s also her personal views on everything that was going on on an artistic level, amongst the intellectuals and artists, and everything that was happening in Italy, in the cultural sphere at that time. So it’s a very small book, but it’s a real treasure.
Nanette Ashby
Sounds amazing. I will put it on the list. Since you’re focusing on different countries, did the women in different countries know about each other? Was there a network internationally, or was it more focused locally or at the same university?
Laia Anguix Vilches
Most of the cases that I found, I found many connections within the country, like, amongst women in different museums, but not so many transnationally. My explanation is that most women were working for a small provincial museum, so maybe they didn’t have a lot of funding to attend the international events or to travel internationally. For example, in Madrid, in 1934, there was an international conference in museology that’s considered as a starting point of what would later become ICOM, the International Council of Museums. But I haven’t found records of the participation of women. Not even the Spanish women were there. If they were, we don’t know. So there’s not so many…like, there were women who were traveling. For example, Palma Bucarelli traveled a lot. She went to the United States, she visited museums there… But not that they were specifically networking with women from other countries.
There is an example that I found in Spanish archives from a Sicilian curator that traveled to attend some archaeology courses in Spain, at least on two occasions. And, I have in my agenda a trip to Palermo to check about her and try to find more details on what she did there and who she met, because I know there were Spanish curators attending those courses as well. So fingers crossed, maybe I will find something, but I haven’t found it yet.
Nanette Ashby
There were some legal constraints for women, specifically tied to marriage, but were there any other constraints that women had to face when pursuing a career generally, but also in the museum sector specifically?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So besides the marriage aspect, it was common practice and expected to have a lower salary as a woman. That was something that was perfectly legal. And there are many examples of those. One that is significant is in France, because, there, women were often expected to work in voluntary roles, in contrast with male colleagues, who were generally offered only paid positions, because there was the idea that men were the breadwinners for their families. So that was quite general. An example that I find quite significant is Elisa Maillard, who was the chief curator at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. It’s a museum about the middle ages. And she was appointed as a volunteer in 1919. And she was working as an unpaid curatorial assistant for 7 years. There was even a journal article about her from Jeanne Misme, she was a feminist journalist who used her as an example of work discrimination in French museums. And maybe that was successful because the following year, Maillard obtained her first paid role as a curatorial assistant at the Musée de Cuny. There were only four paid jobs in that category offered in 1926, and she was one of them. But going from assistant to attachée, which is…sorry, to “adjointe”, which is the next role, would take her another 12 years and also many rejections. For example, in 1933, she was rejected on the claim that she lacked administrative experience. Although, by that time, she had already been working as a curator for 15 years.
Nanette Ashby
Wow. Wow. Okay.
Laia Anguix Vilches
It was only…many museums closed during the war, and only when the museum reopened in post-war Paris that she was finally allowed to become a museum director, and she was already in her fifties. So, yeah, it was a long, long time until she got to a management role and to a pay according to the work she was doing.
Then another example is Bertha Hindshaw. She was the curator of the Manchester Art Museum in Ancoats between 1912 1947. She was specifically appointed because, and I quote from the museum, they say “it was impossible to get such a refined and educated man at the salary that the museum could offer.” So they decided to appoint her at only £50 per year. It was a very low salary that was intended for a part-time position. But the kind of duties she was asked to do were not achievable in part-time, so that means that she had to work full-time there.
Nanette Ashby
So since you’re focusing on multiple countries, on a lot of different women, could you roughly tell us how many women examples? Because you’ve been mentioning quite a few.
Laia Anguix Vilches
So I haven’t counted them, to be honest. I’m mostly looking at maybe, like, the three or four earliest examples in each of the countries I’m studying, which doesn’t mean the three or four earliest in absolute terms, because in some cases, like, circumstances were very volatile, so they didn’t stay for a very long time in the position. They maybe got married very young, and then they left, and maybe they were only in charge for a couple of years. And that’s not enough material for me to really establish a comparative. So I’m looking for examples of women who stayed for most of their professional lives in the museum profession. There would be about three or four examples in each one of these countries.
Nanette Ashby
But that’s still quite a few.
Laia Anguix Vilches
Not all of them have the same amount of information available. Sometimes I get one example for one specific issue, like the salary as I’ve mentioned, but then I don’t have much information regarding other aspects such as the…maybe the decisions they were making. That part, let’s say, I take from different case studies.
Nanette Ashby
But that also means that you can look at the commonalities between the courses their lives took and the choices they made. Are there commonalities? Or is it still quite different based on the countries?
Laia Anguix Vilches
There is actually, like, a common thread that connects them regarding their choices. I think all the limitations that they had shaped their curatorial decisions in many ways. We can even talk maybe of a feminine style of museum curating and collection making. Some of these, like, common points are, for example, a creative vision of the museum space, and they were very knowledgeable on contemporary museological discussions, what was going on at that time in the field. They also had a common focus on museum inclusion and education and also a mainstream preference towards less mainstream collecting practices. Many of them redesigned their museums. In cases…for example, in the case of Caterina Marchenaro, she worked together with a rationalist architect, Franco Albini to redesign and reconstruct the museums in Genova after the war. That’s something that also links many of these women is that they had to rebuild their own museums after the destruction and the bombing of World War II.
They also shared an interest in widening the accessibility of collections. Like, in the early 20th century, museums were considered as a place for study. So they were mostly addressing scholars or people who were already knowledgeable about the museums. Women took a special interest in making museums more accessible for people who hadn’t been going to the museum that much till then. So, for example, we find many cases of creating new educational approaches to the collections. There is Violet Rodgers, who was a curator at the York Castle Museum in North England between 1938 1957, and she renovated the museum’s educational service. She developed an interactive approach to the collections, this was very new. Visitors, for the first time, were allowed to handle and to touch the museum objects. We have another example also in the UK at the Geffrye Museum in London whose director, Molly Harrison, was a curator between 1949 and 1969. She had previously worked as a school teacher, so she rearranged all the museum’s collections, thinking of an audience made of children. So she took the museum from a series of period rooms, like, historical rooms, to a more universal idea of a museum of the home. Although it has a different name nowadays, it’s called the Museum of the Home. Its place in the East End in London, which at that time was a working class neighborhood with plenty of children that had less opportunities, that were impoverished or disadvantaged. This was a shift in the traditional focus on museum research and museum conservation, and it also aligns very well with the museological theories that were just starting to be discussed in international expert forums. There are plenty of scholars that have been discussing these links between gender stereotypes and that women were maybe traditionally encouraged towards female roles, such as children, education,…
And we have also evidence of many women curators showing an interest towards, let’s say, more feminine or feminized collection-making practices. For example, there was new emphasis on museum collections of costume, jewelry, house equipment, poultry. So these practices set the women apart from the mainstream interest in painting or sculpture or the, like, major arts, let’s say. Well, another example from the UK is Anne Buck, who was the curator of costume at Platt Hall in Manchester between 1947 and 1972. And she established the Museum of English Costume. Also, if we look at the handbook for museum curators, that was the textbook that the Museums Association was, in the UK, was using for their students. The edition that was published in 1960, there are only two chapters in the book authored by women. One of them is about costume, written by Anne Buck, and the other one is about children’s education, which is authored by two female curators, Renée Marcus and Barbara Winstanley. Maybe, let’s say there’s a bias, but we don’t really know if there was, like, a preference towards these topics or that maybe women were appropriating a space that was free until that time.
Nanette Ashby
Yeah. That was available. It just made me think I went to a conference about costume curation, and nearly all the people who came looked like women. I’m not sure if they identified all as women, but it was a very female dominated crowd. And, also, most of the speakers were female. So it’s interesting that that is still the case and Dress History as it’s called or Costume History is still a very feminine research area. The stereotypes and assumptions are still linked to that today.
Laia Anguix Vilches
You’re right. Yeah. It is still a field that is very gendered. And, yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned about, like, the female-identifying and something that I should emphasize also when I talk about men and women and the masculine and the feminine. I’m looking at it from a historical perspective and not from a 21st century perspective, but what, like, were the societal standards, like a 100 years ago. So just to make that clear.
Nanette Ashby
After you gave so many very interesting examples, and I would love to hear much more about every one of the women you mentioned, but which woman is your personal favorite that you’ve come across during your research and why?
Laia Anguix Vilches
Okay. So this is very difficult for me to choose because I love all of them for different reasons and their work is individual and remarkable and groundbreaking in many different levels and, for many different circumstances. There are some of them that I really admire because they had very little resources and they really made the most out of what they had. I’ve chosen one, when I was thinking about this question, just because she was kind of an activist in gender practices. So I quite admire that because it’s not something that we come across very commonly at this time, which is pre- the Feminist Wave. So there was not much gender awareness. Her name is Marian Frost. She was the director of Whorthing Museum and Art Gallery. Whirthing is a very small town in the south of England, close to Brighton. She’s interesting because, she appointed exclusively other women as assistants for over 18 years. She was really passionate about that. And it happened to her very often that her staff married. So because of the marriage bar that we have mentioned, they had to leave their jobs. She kept on asking her male committee to keep constantly searching for new female attendants. And these difficulties did not discourage her throughout her whole career in the museum. She actively campaigned in favor of women’s suitability for museum and library jobs. And there’s a quote from her that I really like. And she explained that “the profession required tact, good temper, neatness, and care for detail. Qualities that, in her opinion, were women’s strong points in business life.” So she was clear that women were better at doing the job.
There are also many cases of something that I’ve called matriarchies or dynasties of women curators. So women who were choosing other women to replace them once they retired. And the Whirthing Museum is one of them, and this museum was directed by women for almost half a century.
Nanette Ashby
Oh, wow.
Laia Anguix Vilches
But yeah, there are other cases like, the Museu Balaguer in, that’s a small town near Barcelona in Spain. There have been women in charge almost nonstop since it was founded till the present day. So only, like, a couple of men in over a 100 years. Also, the National Gallery in Warsaw, there’s been, I think only a male curator, and the rest, have all been women since it was created. I’m very interested in all these generations of women.
Nanette Ashby
It makes me think that the women who fought very hard to get into the positions were very aware that they had to help the next generation to maybe not have to go through all of the fights that they had to.
Laia Anguix Vilches
I think that must be one of the reasons. I’ve come across also… they often had to fight their decisions once they were in the role. And in many cases, like in the case of Marian Frost, they had to make decisions together with committees that were only composed by men. Also, very often, they had to give orders to other men, and that must have felt very uncomfortable according to the gender norms at the time. So in some cases, I think this choice was also, like, to facilitate their own lives to to have someone who could be on the same level, let’s say, in the decision and making processes to make their everyday management of the museum maybe easier.
Nanette Ashby
One question we ask all our guests, also with the name of the podcast, is: What are you still curious about? I can imagine if I had to do this research, I would come up with endless questions and endless spots that I still wanted to look into. But what are you still curious about?
Laia Anguix Vilches
I am very curious to know more about more countries. Specifically, I’m very curious about former communist countries, because for what I’ve been recollecting, there’s a bigger proportion of women in museum management in countries such as Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary. But I have a very strong constraint, which is because I don’t speak any Slavic languages. So that would be difficult for me to access, but I would love to read more literature, maybe like secondary literature about them and study what was going on there, like on a social level to facilitate the access of more women to these kinds of roles. Also, I would like to expand on this aspect of curatorial taste and the choices that women were making regarding collection-making, regarding exhibitions, what kind of topics they were covering, who were they addressing with their curation, what were their interests regarding research and the reception of the exhibitions they were creating? All these aspects are very interesting. And also these potential transformational connections, I would love to find more about that. Maybe they don’t exist, or maybe they are, and I still haven’t found them. So I’m very curious to investigate more about that.
Nanette Ashby
I’m always surprised that so much of the correspondence still exists. The fact that letters are still in archives, I’m always fascinated about that, that they made it through the years. I assume that the listeners are also just as interested to read more about this topic as I am. So I was wondering if you had any recommendations where to find more information. You already mentioned one of the books, but do you have any more suggestions where we could find more information?
Laia Anguix Vilches
So I think a great starting point is Kate Hill’s book from 2017. It’s called Women In Museums. She doesn’t only look at curators, but at other kinds of women in the museum world, either as donors, patrons, assistants… So that’s a very, very, interesting and exciting book. There is also a book that is a bit older, it’s from 1998…but it’s authored or edited by Margarita Díaz-Andreu and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen. And it is a book about women in European archaeology. It is called, Excavating Women. There is a very interesting overlap because many of the women that I’ve been mentioning were managing archaeological museums. So what Sørensen and Díaz-Andreu argue is that the women were often not allowed in the field, like, to actually excavate. So they were, like “office jobs”, and that’s why the many women archaeologists ended up in museum management. But, yeah, there’s this overlap, which I find very interesting. Right now, there are many new projects that are considering the presence of women in the visual arts and the overlapping between gender and museums in a more wide level. And, some of them are really exciting. There is a local one in the Netherlands that I love. It’s called De Andere Helft, “the other half”. This is a wider research project that looks at women, the presence of women in the visual arts in the Netherlands since the 18th century until the late 20th century. It’s a collaboration between the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands Institute for Art History, University of Amsterdam, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Sorry because my Dutch is very bad. But, yeah, it’s a very big project with many researchers involved, and they also organize expert meetings that I totally recommend.
And, there are also many biographies and monographs about individual curators. So, the lives of…not a comparison like I do… but just focusing on one of them. For example, for Spain, I would highly recommend Anna Athora La Costa’s (??) work. She focuses on pre-Civil War Spanish women curators, and she has authored widely on this topic. And it’s really exciting to read about all these women or Italian curators. There are also monographs on Palma Bucarelli, on Fernanda Wittgens, on Caterina Marcenaro. All of them have specific biographies and books that are very exciting to read. I should say that some of these books are only maybe published in Spanish or in Italian, so there’s a little bit of translation involved. And there is also a podcast from the Ministry of Culture in Italy that is called the “Paladine”, which is also about pioneering women in the museum profession in Italy, and it’s very exciting.
Nanette Ashby
Yes. Awesome! Thank you so much. And thanks so much for taking the time. Very interesting. Where can we follow your work? I will obviously leave all the links in the show notes that are available on our web site as well. But do you already know where the finished work will be published?
Laia Anguix Vilches
Thanks a lot to you for inviting me. This has been a very, very exciting conversation. And I normally share all my publications in these very academic networks, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu. There is also “Radboud Repository”, makes everything accessible, like all the publications we make. This is a project that I only started, like, about a year ago. So there is a publication that is now in press and should come out in a few months. It’s a bookshop regarding women in the periphery of the arts. So I think this will be a good chapter. But, but, yeah, mostly on academic networks, I would say.
Nanette Ashby
Awesome. Thank you so much!
You can find more information and links to everything we talked about in this episode in the show notes over at raffia-magazine.com, and please let us know what you think over on Instagram at raffia_magazine. If you like this podcast, why don’t you leave us a lovely review on Spotify? Thanks so much for listening and all your support for the podcast. I’ll catch you in the next episode. Bye!
Raffia 